A Noisy Silence about Care: Swedish Preschool Teachers’ Talk about Documentation

The purpose of this study is to investigate how preschool teachers talk about documentation. The study examines institutional narratives about care in Swedish preschools in the light of a preschool policy placing higher documentation demands in ECEC.

The author concludes that the teachers' narratives about care in preschool are becoming silenced. According to the author, care should be part of the preschool teachers' institutional narratives, partly because care has traditionally been part of the Swedish education system, and partly because research shows that care is an important element in the teachers' professionalism. The author is surprised that care is missing from the teachers' narratives.

The analysis of the interviews showed very few references to care. Care was often associated with learning, for example the preschool teachers talked about the fact that the children had to learn to care for one another.

The author finds that the preschool teachers are not critical about learning as an important goal in preschool. The preschool teachers often describe the children's learning as the best practice in the preschool or the desired outcome. For example, they describe how physical care for the children sometimes stands in the way for the desired practice. For instance, one department had to be cleaned due to lice, and as an unfortunate consequence, on that particular day, the preschool teachers did not have focus on the children's learning.

The data material consists of 12 interviews with 17 preschool teachers from seven preschools in two Swedish cities. Four of the interviews were conducted with two preschool teachers at a time, while the rest were one-to-one interviews. The preschool teachers were to talk about their work in the preschool and about their experiences with documentation in preschool from a professional and personal perspective.

Löfgren, H. (2016). A Noisy Silence about Care: Swedish Preschool Teachers’ Talk about Documentation. Early Years 36(1), 4-16.